Samsung begins mass production of 1Tb QLC 9th Generation V-NAND
The QLC 9th-generation V-NAND flash minimizes the area of cells and peripherals to deliver the industry’s highest bit density, an increase of 86% over the previous generation of QLC V-NAND flashes.
South Korean giant Samsung Electronics has announced that it has mass-produced the industry’s first 1Tb quad level cell (QLC) 9th-generation V-NAND flash, solidifying its position in the high-capacity and high-performance NAND flash market.
A 1Tb V-NAND flash has 1 trillion bits of cells in a single chip, while a QLC is a structure that can record 4 bits of data in a single cell.
In another first for the semiconductor industry, Samsung mass-produced a TLC 9th-generation V-NAND flash in April.
A triple level cell (TLC) can record 3-bit data in a single cell.
“Kicking off the successful mass production of QLC 9th-generation V-NAND just four months after the TLC version, allows us to offer a full lineup of advanced SSD solutions that address the needs for the AI era,” said SungHoi Hur, Executive Vice President and Head of Flash Product & Technology at Samsung Electronics, according to a media release.
“As the enterprise SSD market shows rapid growth with stronger demand for AI applications, we will continue to solidify our leadership in the segment through our QLC and TLC 9th-generation V-NAND,” he added.
Samsung’s 9th-generation V-NAND flash uses channel hole etching technology to achieve the high number of cells in a double stack structure.
Channel hole etching sequentially stacks mold layers and then creates channel holes through which electrons can move at once, while double stack is a structure created by performing a channel hole process twice.
The QLC 9th-generation V-NAND flash minimizes the area of cells and peripherals to deliver the industry’s highest bit density, an increase of approximately 86% over the previous generation of QLC V-NAND flashes.
The ninth-generation QLC has improved write performance by 100% and data input/output speed by 60% compared to the previous generation of QLC products through the innovation of predictive program technology which minimizes unnecessary operations by predicting changes in the state of a cell, the company said.
Power consumption for reading and writing data has also been reduced by 30% and 50%, respectively, through low power design tech that lowers the voltage driving NAND cells and senses only necessary bit lines.
Samsung plans to expand applications of the QLC 9th-generation V-NAND, starting with branded consumer products. It also plans to extend into mobile Universal Flash Storage (UFS), PCs and server SSDs for customers including cloud service providers.
